BY AARON BARLOW A decade or so ago, I applied for a travel grant to examine papers of Carlos Salzedo, a twentieth-century French/American harpist. The request was turned down, the result of a scathing evaluation by someone who was incensed that I had not mentioned the other important French/American harpist of the time, Marcel Grandjany.…
BY AARON BARLOW The focus of discussion on Donald Trump is, understandably, the man himself—but the phenomenon of his success arises elsewhere. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, that “there is no there there,” applies to the man: all we have “there” is a massive ego. Trump is simply a skilled entertainer, Howard Beale of…
BY AARON BARLOW Two members of the new AAUP chapter at Mount St. Mary’s University—one tenured, one not—have been fired. According to an article by Scott Jaschik on Inside Higher Ed today, that leaves only ten chapter members. One, a tenured philosophy professor, was fired for disloyalty. The other, the faculty advisor to The Mountain…
BY AARON BARLOW The crisis is upon us. It has been building—the pressure on a fault line—for at least 45 years, certainly since the Powell Memo of 1971. By soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, it includes this: One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates,…
BY AARON BARLOW On January 26, I posted Professor Rob Latham’s statement concerning his possible firing to the University of California Board of Regents. Though tenured, he was fired. There has been great interest in Latham’s statement (as can be seen in the comments). In response, and after what I’ve heard was a contentious meeting,…
BY AARON BARLOW On January 20, the University of California Board of Regents took the incredibly rare step of dismissing a tenured professor for cause, a sanction that has occurred only a handful of times in the University’s history. Rob Latham, Professor of English at UC Riverside, was dismissed, over the recommendation of the UCR…
BY AARON BARLOW The reasoning behind the choice of “Media and the Faculty” as the theme of the current issue of Academe can be gleaned from David Daley’s interview on Salon with Jane Mayer about her new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Concerning Lewis Powell who, before being…
There has been a great deal of interest in the Open Syllabus Project, including an article in The New York Times. I thought I’d take a look at it and see what tentative conclusions I could draw (a la Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading) about what is being taught in my field of English in the United States.…